but it needs structure!

Peer-produced medical information

OPENMEDiAID aims to rethink medical knowledge management by applying commons-based peer production and putting the patient at the centre!

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We want to build a solution as a democratic, not-for-profit platform. Your contribution matters! Check out how...

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Data & Technology

Medicine is an empirical science: Decisions and actions should be guided by real world observations. By facilitating data collection and with application of powerful data processing technologies we aim to turn that data into evidence and helpful information for the community

An essential building block for any medical information system is an understanding of medical concepts and their relationships - a medical data model. We want to build an open access catalog of medical knowledge with a team of medical and IT experts.

Machines are the most reliable data processors. Humans are the most creative computers. We think that combining the two makes a lot of sense. Machines do data matching and statistical analysis. Humans review the results and feed reasonable findings back to the system

Recommender systems have long been used to delight (read:annoy) us with product recommendations based on our preferences. The underlying paradigm of social filtering is a very powerful one. We want to integrate a recommender system for medical information into OPENMEDiAID

Collaboration

Medical data collection and knowledge building is not an easy task to do. We trust that a healthy community process with many collaborating brains is up to this challenge. Commons-based peer production has already shown to work for complex problems.

In order to build a working system around medical data,both patients and medical experts are needed. Doctors help build data models, peer-review data and supervise computer-aided knowledge discovery. Patients give insights into health aspects, that only a patient can have

Peer production is a powerful scheme that has been made possible by technological advances of the internet. Transaction costs have decreased dramatically and large, distributed crowds are now able to self-organize the accomplishment of complex tasks.

The entire project is open to participation. We try to be transparent about ongoing work and missing expertise or other resources. If you feel that you can add valuable work to any of our projects, please contact us. Read about how to contribute

Patient Empowerment

From all involved actors, patients have the strongest sense of ownership – it’s about THEIR health. Many patients become skilled and knowledgeable regarding the every day dynamics of their condition. They have a lot to share and may be just waiting for opportunities.

Being in control of ones own health data is a requirement for taking informed decisions. We want to offer a management tool to patients such that each can own her/his personal health record Read more..

Facilitate knowledge exchange among people. We want to build a system that automatically connects similar patients in order to create support groups wherein members are very likely to learn and benefit from each others progress. Read more..

Information is a key factor in facilitating empowerment as it allows people to take informed decisions. We want to spread as much useful knowledge as possible without spamming people with irrelevant health information Read more..

Openness

Openness is an essential ingredient for making use of the intelligence and power of crowds. Only if anybody has unlimited access to the creation of the others can she/he participate in improving it.This is why we want to open up medicine to the community!

We will develop all parts of our software as open source projects. Code is designed, discussed, tested and revised by many brains. Everybody can see what the code is doing, everybody can make modifications.

We want to facilitate the collection of many individual medical cases in order to allow the community to verify health claims made by individuals or industries, extract best practices and promote the most useful findings to all interested recipients.

We want medical knowledge to become part of the public domain. All our work will be licensed accordingly such that anybody can make free use of it.

It seems to be broken

The general design of most health care systems relies on a small group of trained experts and profit-oriented economies to provide medical care to a continuously growing population. Unfortunately, the experts and financial resources available to provide this care to the people are outgrown by their increasing needs.

Medical products and services are increasingly sophisticated but more and more expensive. Economic interests tend to hinder the development of cheap medicine and favour non-transparent markets. The system is broken by design – it doesn’t scale with our growing needs.

Conflict of interests

Conflict of interests

From a shareholders point of view it is more attractive to make a patient become a long-term consumer of medical services/products instead of a one-time customer. Read more…

Lack of information

Lack of information

Most of the existing medical knowledge bases are either biased and of low quality or commercial and protected by pay-walls. Too little effort is made to integrate the various sources of information. Read more….

Lack of trust

Lack of trust

Medical information is subject to strict data privacy policies which are a consequence of the growing distrust towards industries and state institutions to use data for money making or surveillance instead of helping people to get better. Read more…

Lack of time

Lack of time

Many doctors lament that they do not have sufficient time to spend on a single patient. There is not enough discussion, explanation or cooperative decision making. Patients regularly don’t feel taken seriously. Read more….

How about this fix: Technology and peer production

…under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them’… wisdom of crowds is derived not from averaging solutions, but from aggregating them.

Surowiecki, J. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds

The idea of OPENMEDiAID is to accomplish the development and operation of a non-profit, Medical Information Network as a community effort:

Let us collectively create a community platform for medicine built on models of expert medical knowledge, open medical data and machine learning. It will be transparent about its data and algorithms, empower patients to be active agents in medical decision making and knowledge building, save research time for both patients and doctors, be trustworthy with a non-profit community that has not conflict of interest.

Patients manage their own health record document their progress, personal insights and expertise on their condition and anonymously share it with the community.

Together they create a software platform able to provide case-specific medical information and recommendations backed by data. A network of people collaborating to find the best solutions for their health problems.

Moreover, OPENMEDiAID is powered by people AND machines. Supervised learning algorithms work tirelessly to filter, classify and prepare information from the pool of medical profiles. Incoming medical data is continuously incorporated into the case-specific clusters and statistics on symptoms, diseases, treatments and clinical tests.

The algorithms will connect patients with similar profiles to form support groups wherein relevant discoveries of individual patients are automatically distributed to all their peers.

Open Medicine Initiative e.V.

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OPENMEDiAID is NOT a diagnostic tool nor is it meant to replace doctor consultations. All personal medical data will be stored ANONYMOUSLY, meaning that no references to the actual identity of its owner is held anywhere in the system.